THE Cambridge Connection - Episode 43

the $50 lobster. At some point, the decision comes, am I doing this anymore? Right. And here’s what concerns me, right? 1% in June, its highest rate in nearly 41 years.

That’s pretty big. Huge. Now, in attachment to that, I’m going to read from Credit and Collection News. As Americans grapple with inflation, the number of new credit cards have surged as more Americans rely on them to keep up with high prices for the $50 lobster, probably, and other things. And the gas to drive to the Cape.

Let’s not forget that. Right. 103 trillion. Wow. Within the last year.

Yep. 092 trillion in 2019. 2019. OK. It seems like consumers have to buckle up.

Prime week shopping and guest introduction

It seems like the government probably needs to buckle up. Sure. And this past week was Prime Week, was it not? On Amazon? Amazon Prime.

I saw that, yes. I didn’t go near it. Did you? I did. Well, OK.

Full disclosure. OK. I had to throw my pressure cooker out. OK. So there was a combo pressure cooker and air fryer.

Two in one? Two in one. OK. And it was about $100 off the retail value. Oh.

Free shipping. Next day, had to do it. Well, that’s smart shopping. And speaking of smart shopping, our guest today, his name is Randy Nemiroff. He’s the founder of Perk Plans, which is an online platform that people can get discounted services.

Don’t we need that right now? We do. I couldn’t think of a better time to have a guest like that on to start giving consumers some thought on options where they can go to find discounts on all kinds of things. Perfect. So we’re going to take a quick break.

Introducing perk plans and its background

We’ll be right back with The Cambridge Connection. Are the rise in prices for gas and other expenses crushing your budget? Cambridge’s typical clients save $140 per month while paying down their credit card debt at much lower interest rates. Call 1-800-CAMBRIDGE. Welcome back, everyone, to The Cambridge Connection.

I’m here with my co-pilot, Tina Marie. And we are talking about, obviously, inflation and the cost of goods. On this show, we try to navigate all the different types of things that deal with financial well-being and financial empowerment. And unfortunately, right about now, because of the cost of goods and energy and everything, people are struggling. They’re using credit cards.

The statistics we said in the previous segment, how bad things are getting. And what a better opportunity to have, to have our special guest, Randy Nemiroff from Perk Plans. Randy, how are you doing today? I am very well. Thanks for having me on today.

Hi, Randy. Nice having you. Thank you. Yeah, man. So, obviously, we have this economic situation that doesn’t look like it’s getting better anytime soon.

And before we get into Perk Plans, if you could just give our listeners and our family and our friends just a little bit of background on you and what you do, and then talk about Perk Plans. Sure. Thanks a lot. Okay. So, Perk Plans, for me, started way back in 2005.

I’m in the mortgage industry, and I wanted to figure out a way of generating mortgage leads, but I didn’t want to do it the traditional way of just working with real estate agents. I wanted to work with companies, unions, associations, even nonprofits, and have them promote me to all their employees, their members, and their clients. And I created a mortgage benefit program where I offered a lender credit to the individuals, you know, doing the mortgages. And I guess I got very lucky because the first company I ever signed up was the Union for Lockheed Martin. So right off the bat, I had thousands of employees, and I started writing mortgages almost immediately.

Then I did a mortgage for the head of the legal department at Toys R Us, told them what I was doing for Lockheed, and they said, Hey, why don’t you bring your program in here? We have 10,000 employees. So I decided to build out a whole real estate portal at that point. You know, I wanted to try and find a way of saving my clients additional money from not just their mortgage, but from home inspectors, and flooring companies, and window companies, and credit repair. So I created a real estate portal.

Does the platform still offer help there? Because obviously, if you started doing this in 2005, here we are years later, and the mortgage industry has obviously had its ups and downs as well. So are these services still available? Oh, yeah. So the platform has actually evolved over the years to be a full-blown out national affinity platform, where we don’t just do it regionally anymore, we do it nationally.

And we’ve added well over 5 million members on a national level. And we offer all these different real estate products. You’re getting a lender cutter from your mortgage company, your moving company. We have Cambridge Credit Counseling for those in need of credit repair. Anything we can do to help.

But then the platform has evolved to add savings for travel, health and wellness, entertainment, business products and services. So we’re working with companies now that are national associations, local businesses can even do this. And we’re actually helping them build their own customized PERC platform that they then can plug into their own website or intranet, and then offer these PERCs as a benefit to not just their employees, but their clients. And even the members of the association. So it sounds like there’s just a lot of resources out there that a consumer may not be aware of that you’re bringing to their attention.

Well, they’re actually aware of them because they’re already buying from them. They’re just not getting discounts from them. Yeah, exactly. That’s what I meant. So we’re actually offering them a platform, whereas if you’re going to a retail store or you’re booking a hotel room or you’re, you know, anything that you’re doing, you’re actually saving on now.

And we’re signing up organizations all over the country by doing this. So with the savings on travel, and I think if I heard you right, some of these benefits are national organizations and some are even if you’re in, let’s say, San Francisco, California, and you go onto the platform, you’ll be able to find local vendors that can offer savings in like restaurants and shopping, etc. Exactly. Exactly. We’ve got one right now in Margate, New Jersey, living at the beach, living the life.

And what we’ve done is we’ve built PERC platforms for some of the local businesses down here. But then we’re also creating, we have a whole local section, and we’ve married it to social media. We’ve built like the best of Down Beach, which is right here in the Margate area. And we’re spotlighting local businesses to be pushed out on the platform to save everybody down here money from not just our national partners, but even the local restaurants and entertainment vendors. Randy, I don’t know if you know this, but Tina Marie was just in the Cape eating lobster.

And I think she might want to raise you on the ocean experience, because she just is all full of energy and tan because she just got back from the Cape. So thank you both for shoving the beach vacationing opportunity in my face. I appreciate that. You’ll get there. It’s not a vacation now.

This is where I live full time. All right. That’s enough. That’s enough. Life’s a beach.

You know that, Gordon, you’re welcome down here anytime you go on. Absolutely. The problem is that you have to leave at a certain point. No. I don’t.

Yeah. That is a problem. You might not get rid of them. I’ll just call counseling right after this. I guess I’m going to have, I’m probably going to need it.

How perk plans works for organizations

All right. So Randy, Perk Plans is customizable to a specific organization. So can you explain, I mean, this show is for consumers. It’s for businesses. We do B2B discussions sometimes.

So this is obviously for both. So for an organization, can you explain the process? Yeah. So it’s real simple. com and we can set up a short 15 minute demo for your organization so they can offer these perks to every single employee that works there.

Now, from an organization’s point of view, most organizations offer some type of benefits, whether it’s insurance benefits, but, and they may have a couple of local businesses that they offer something to their employees, but what we do is we show them how to build and customize their own platform where we allow them to pick and choose the perks that they want from our menu and even build in any local or regional perks that they may already offer. So it’s semi a la carte platform. Yeah, exactly. And then once they get it, nobody comes to Perk Plans to access the perks. They go to their own company’s website or intranet to be able to access them.

And what’s very cool about our platform is that there’s zero maintenance required on this platform. If we update the master platform, theirs is automatically updated as we add new perks all the time. Randy, let me ask you a question because I just recently got a shih tzu. Are there any veterinarians on Perk Plans? I can hear some dogs in the background.

Well, we don’t have individual, actually, I think we do. I think we do have some veterinarians, like a whole national resource for that. But then we also have Liberty Mutual pet insurance. And we have, what else do we have for pets? We have nationwide pet insurance, we have discount pet prescriptions.

So we have a lot of things just for your individual pet, because we know how people care more about their pets than anything else. Good to know. Good to know. So are there some organizations you’d like to share? You said Cambridge Credit Counseling I know is one of them that you’re offering their services.

Their counseling is free, obviously, but if they do have to engage in a service that has a cost attached to it, there’s a discount for people through the platform. Is that right? Exactly. I mean, we offer, just to give you an idea of the different categories that we’ve created, industry, we have a lot of real estate and home services. So from mortgage companies, to title companies, to home inspectors, to solar, I’m just looking through the, yes, solar, security systems.

We even have moving companies that are saving people a ton of money. From there, we have an entire insurance marketplace, where we’ve partnered with the largest insurance technology company, I believe in the world. They’re in about 20 countries. And just in the United States last year, if you want to say when you’re auto and home, they wrote over $5 billion in premiums last year, just in the United States, because they have a direct API link to over 100 carriers here in the United States, and they combined you right there on the spot. Yeah, but then we have carriers like Liberty Mutual.

We have a great relationship for AIG, for life insurance. Wow, that’s incredible. And then you get into even financial wellness with college tuition assistance. Yeah, that’s a big thing right now. 5%, 7%.

We’re refinancing people at 3% right now. com, Travelocity, Expedia, every theme park and attraction in the country, from Disney World to Disneyland, car rentals. We have tickets to every major sporting event and concert in the entire country. You know, if you want to buy a ticket to a ballgame, we have even movie tickets. National retailers, all the sports franchises, the local that we already discussed.

Mortgage industry and housing market shifts

We even have one that I like to have fun with, it’s called Gift of Magazine, and we have magazines and there’s actually no cost at all for magazines, and you can pick as many as you want to. So the show is about helping you, our family, our friends, consumers, listeners, to navigate through things that will help with financial wellness, financial wisdom, financial empowerment. We deal with money coming in and money going out, that’s why we go to work, we have to pay bills, we’re in an economic time where things aren’t getting any better, and it’s great to have you on the show, Randy, to talk about PERC plans and how people can find discounts for services and local businesses, even national businesses. Being in the mortgage industry and your experience in there, obviously the housing market again has been bananas and that’s seemingly starting to quickly slow down. Can you talk to that a little bit?

Yeah, exactly. So when I built this platform, the one thing that I wanted to focus into was financial wellness. I mean, even though we have, you know, the fun stuff like travel and entertainment and health and wellness products and services, I always wanted the main focus to be on the financial wellness side of it. And what I did was, because I’m in the mortgage industry, I’ve now partnered with a national mortgage company called Antimaco Mortgage. And what’s nice about them is we have about 500 plus loan officers around the country, and Antimac as a mortgage company...

is very unique. They’re very community oriented, but they’re always trying to think outside the box. And when you talk to a mortgage company, a lot of mortgage companies, what they’re going to do is they’re going to talk to you about 30 year mortgages, 15 year mortgages, you know, arm products, all the products that they sell. But right now our industry is going through a major shakeup. Okay, eight months, a year ago, it was unbelievable.

I mean, houses were selling for way over market value. You listed a house and it was gone the next day. But the problem, one of the biggest problems people had was most of the people buying the homes were making cash offers. So what Antimac did was they came up with their own individual program through Antimac Private Equities called Cash to Keys. And basically what that does is when they do a pre-approval for a borrower, they’re doing a full blown out pre-approval.

And what they’re doing is they’re pre-approving that borrower to now make a cash offer on a house instead of having to go in with a mortgage contingency. And the program is taking off like wildfire. It’s revolutionizing the entire mortgage industry. And eventually down the road, a lot of other mortgage companies are going to get into similar programs. But the nice thing about Antimac is they finance it, you know, it’s an in-house program through Antimac Private Equities.

So this particular program is helping people purchase homes and close on those homes in two or three weeks, but they’re now able to make a cash offer on the property. The other thing that they created was a program, buy now, sell later, where let’s say somebody’s looking to purchase a home, but they have a home to sell, but they haven’t sold that home yet. What they’ll do is Antimac’s program will allow them to now purchase a new home, and then Antimac Private Equities will buy the other house from them and have it sold within six months. Oh, wow. But it’s an amazing program.

It’s an interesting way that the industry has evolved. So here’s something that I think, you know, being a credit counselor over my career, Tina Marie, we talk to people that struggle with finances and, you know, I saw even some information where it said that people were even waiving appraisals to buy the home in this crazy market. So while it seems like these people that were coming up with cash offers, there has to be a ton of people that just overbought and overpaid and probably don’t have the means really to support such a thing, similar to what happened in 2008. And when people start doing things like waiving appraisals and inspections and things of that nature, I mean, that’s where it gets dangerous, where they’re making really poor decisions. Right.

And you, considering... I mean, I’ve never been a proponent of somebody not doing the research, you know, for anything that they’re purchasing. Yeah, but what it did, right? You said people were paying... I know some personal friends that were bidding $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 over the asking price in with six or seven people, right?

So now they’re negotiating and bidding, and you said houses turn around sometimes in a day in this past market, and that just makes people not do their homework, not do their research, get desperate, right? And then what are we left with? We’re left with a lot of people with overvalued homes, and I just... Do you see any indicators of where that’s going in the future with inflation and everything that we’re dealing with right now? Well, nobody thought that we were going to be going through, as a country, what we’re going through right now, where your 401ks are losing value every single day, where everything that you purchase is way more than it used to be.

You know, going out to dinner, supporting a family, filling up your gas tank. I mean, everything is completely different today, and people are always looking for ways to cut back and save. You know, and that’s where PERC plans can come in as a resource, but from the housing market’s point of view, yeah, you’re right. There’s going to be people down the road that have overpaid. Now the values are going to start coming back down to reality a little bit, and with interest rates going up, it’s going to start knocking out a lot of people that can’t afford those homes anymore.

Right. And rent. Rent is just increasing as well. It seems like everything is going the total wrong direction. Yes.

Everything but your pay, right? Every billion you get right now is more than it used to be. Absolutely. You know, it’s actually pretty good to hear, you know, that you’re proud of working with ANIMAC, because I have been witnessing, just from some people in the financial circle, that a lot of mortgage lenders are laying people off right now, because all of that business that was available, inventory is now low, so there’s not that many deals in the hopper. I talked to one mortgage broker that was doing 20 deals, or had 20 deals in the hopper, and now only has like two.

So it seems like there’s a lot of strain in the people in the industry that relied on these sales to make an income. Yeah, but if you’re a mortgage company and you were a refi shop, well, now you’re getting killed. You know, because the refi market has kind of dried up a lot. The only refis that people are doing now are cash-out refis. They’re borrowing against their equity of their home.

You know, and in some cases, that’s good, but, you know, you want to make sure that you get the right advice from the mortgage professional, you know, make sure that they’re not just trying to sell you something. It’s funny, because the sponsor... It’s not right for you. Absolutely. The sponsor of our show, Cambridge Credit Counseling, they offer reverse mortgage counseling for senior citizens to make sure that they know the pros and cons, and they have to get certified outside of the transaction.

Real estate agents and reaching perk plans

And in desperate times like this, it almost seems like that would be another safety measure for people to just know, have somebody looking over their shoulder and saying, okay, let’s look at the good parts of this, and let’s look at the bad parts of this, and then you can make a decision not to be desperate and just quickly make, you know, an abrupt decision. Exactly. All right, so we have a couple minutes left. Real quick, can you talk about, to our real estate agent friends, how you can put the platform on a real estate agent’s website or contact information? So real estates today, you know, are trying to find ways of how do I stand out from the other real estate agent?

I mean, being in the mortgage industry, you know, loan officers and real estate agents are a commodity. There are so many of us out there. What makes us stand apart from everybody else? And some of it is reputation, but the other is making sure that they’re working with the right partners that are going to make sure that they’re really taking care of their clients. And that’s one of the reasons that I’m very happy that I’m working with Animac, because they really take care of their clients.

You know, they make sure that they have special offerings, and they’re giving the right financial advice to every single person that they work with. So I’m very proud to be associated with a company like that. And by going out and finding things like perk plans, like cash the keys as a program, you know, you have to always look for things that are going to help your clients out, and not always just do things right outside the box, you know, in the box. You have to look outside the box sometimes. Well, something that my co-pilot and I are familiar with is we constantly run out of time on this show.

So before we let you go, can you please let our listeners, our family, our friends know how to reach out to you if they’re interested in learning more about perk plans? com. com. And my phone number is 856-396-8555. I’d be very happy to talk to you and show you exactly what our program is all about, and how we can help you as a real estate agent.

Well, this is incredibly... Important information, Randy. Thank you so much for joining us today. PERC plans, obviously consumers need this type of opportunity to save when just about everything costs more money, including air at this point it seems. So thank you so much for joining us today and we’d love to have you back on the show to continue to showcase the great work that you guys do.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me today. Thank you, Randy. All right, we’re gonna take a quick break and close up the show. We’ll be right back.

Reflecting on perk plans and budgeting

This is Gordon Oliver with The Cambridge Connection. Are you feeling the financial strain at the gas station, supermarket, or for everything you purchased today? Introducing PERC plans. PERC plans works with companies, unions, associations, and even nonprofits by building them their own customized discount platform offered to their employees, members, and even clients. In association with Antimac Mortgage, learn how PERC plans can help you add value to your brand by providing this unique opportunity to offer handpicked national and local discounts, including real estate, travel, entertainment, insurances, flowers and gifts, health and wellness products and services, as well as receiving expert advice accessed directly on your organization’s own website or internet.

Welcome back, everyone, to The Cambridge Connection here with my co-pilot, Tina Marie, another show where we ran out of time and we could talk about this topic, buying a home, doing your research, dealing with real estate agents, et cetera. Ironically, Gordon, I did exactly what Randy had mentioned. I actually refied and cashed out about five months ago on my house and I did get a, I got a lower rate, which was wonderful, and I was able to do a lot of updates with the cash out. So, if I had known that I could have gotten discounts on my travel to the Cape this last weekend. And that lobster.

And that lobster. That, right. Restaurants, car rental, hotels, that sounds like a really good deal there. Yeah, and this is kind of the education that you provide as a credit counselor to people when you’re going through a budget, right? Yes.

It is looking at these items now, what does your restaurant spend look like? What does your grocery spend look like? And if you know that you can go, if you’re gonna plan on going on vacation around the holidays, right? Now, number one, now’s the time to start planning. Number two, when you have platforms like Perk Plans that you can go, and some employers have benefits in there where there’s other ways of doing it.

But if they don’t have it, and you’re looking to put plans together and savings, it would sound like, as an employee, I would wanna go to my HR director and say, hey, do we have a benefit platform like this? And if not, can you speak to this gentleman and see how we can add it? And employees would definitely appreciate that. That’s something that would be a great resource for them. Everybody, you know, we talk about inflation, and we know, it’s no secret what we’re spending on gas and groceries.

And as just human beings, we deserve a little bit of downtime, and just budgeting accordingly for that. Not coming back from vacation in, you know, $1,000 deeper in credit card debt is something that you’ve really gotta think about, and just budget accordingly. We keep it real here, right? Yes, absolutely. And you were, a couple weeks ago, you were, and this is what I think everybody’s dealing with.

You were high anxiety. Oh, gosh. You needed a break. Yes. And obviously, you came back.

Now you’re all fresh. And again, people have to take that time. Mental health, we’ve had guests on this show to talk about being healthy mentally, and sometimes you gotta take a break. But if you take the break, and it’s not planned, and you overspend on it, and then you have to come back and deal with that anxiety, and that just perpetuates. It brings it all back.

It ruins it, right? So you gotta have a plan. Be prepared. Always financial wisdom, financial navigating, financial empowerment. That’s what this show is about.

Show wrap up and credits

Huge thank you to our producers, Leah and Lisa. We have great experts on the horizon, as you see, from this show and past shows. com, click on podcasts, and click on The Cambridge Connection. You can also go to where you listen to your favorite podcast shows, like Spotify and others. Once again, be part of the conversation.

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